From the Chrysalis (3 page)

The tepid water was only about five feet deep and their feet were almost immediately anchored by weeds. No use swimming, she thought. They weren’t going anyplace. She sank underneath with him for more coverage, then felt his cool hands gloss over her breasts and slip between her legs. Although she had never touched herself down
there,
she let him
.
 

Briefly, her mind shut down. She had never felt this way before, so alive in her own skin. He broke the surface first, gasping and pulling her up with him. If he hadn’t, she might not have bothered to come up for air. She was ready to die right there, with him, in Uncle Tom’s pond. It would be all right. He lifted her high in the air, almost letting her fall. Her hair streamed over her shoulders.
More
, she thought, looking down into his laughing face,
more.
 

When she slid back down into his arms, she knew he would catch her. “Wrap your legs around my waist,” he urged her, then pressed his mouth against her throat. How did he know that what’s she had always wanted, somebody to kiss her neck?
Dace
, she thought, opening her mouth and laughing right out loud.
What was I thinking? I can’t leave here. I belong here.

The straps were still on her shoulders, but he pulled the cups of her plain white bra down, freeing her breasts. He could see them now, but she no longer cared. He bent his head and touched their tips with his tongue. “I guess you’re
not
a little girl,” he said, catching drops of water as they dripped from her little pink nipples into his mouth.
 

Their hands were on each other’s shoulders when they heard Dace’s father. The sound of his voice started her heart thudding so hard it felt like a fish jumping in her chest.

“What the hell are you two doing?” Uncle Norm stormed towards the shore, the late afternoon sun hiding his face. “Outta there
now
! You’re cousins, for God’s sake. Jumping, jumping Jesus Christ!”

She was so scared she didn’t remember getting out of the water, much less letting go of
him,
but she must have, for she was scrambling into her dress and trying to slide into her shoes when he said, “I’ll write, Liza, I’ll write,” and left her at the shore.

Chapter 2

Biting Off More than She Could Chew

Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most

Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,

The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life

*[Lord Byron, “Manfred,” Act 1, Scene 1]

A pity beyond all telling,

Is hid in the heart of love.

*[ W.B. Yeats, “The Pity of Love,” 1893.]

Toronto, August 27, 1966:
 

Dace didn’t write her, and she knew it was her own fault she was so disappointed. She must have heard or read him wrong. The sun had been in their eyes. What must her uncle have thought? For several nights afterwards, she hardly slept. Why in the world had she thought Dace might want to write to her? She was just a little girl, his cousin, and not even in high school yet. At least Uncle Norm hadn’t said anything to his brother. Her father would have killed her on the spot.
 

Despite her doubts, she waited weeks for some word from him. Then one Saturday afternoon, when her father started yelling again, she set off for the big Central Reference Library. She always walked the streets when her father got mad, strolling past the shops on Bloor Street or Harbord, even heading all the way downtown. Sometimes she went into the Woolworth’s west of Christie and poked around the crowded aisles, but the stores were closed when she went out at night.
 

Several dogs fenced in their backyards barked at her as she hurried down the dirt lane, but by the time she’d reached the main sidewalk they had gone back to drooling in the shade. The man in the house across the lane who was always rubbing his groin had more endurance.

“Madonna,” he called. He whistled through stained and broken teeth. “Very nice. You like some nice wine? Very nice, very sweet.” She hurried past him, eyes on the ground.

It was the dog days of summer. School was about to start and this year she’d start high school, heading into the dauntingly huge building called Harbord Collegiate. She doubted she’d have much time to spare after September. She wanted to find more out about Dace and had put off this expedition for too long. After the family reunion at the farm, she had tried pumping her overworked mother for information, but to no avail. She didn’t know anything, except it had been difficult for his father to raise two kids alone. There might be something in the local newspaper though. Especially if it involved a lawyer and the courts.
 

Liza was a little nervous about what her research might reveal, but anything was better than sitting on a kitchen chair in the shady alley beside her house, staring at her neighbour’s brick wall and trying to catch a breeze.
 

Her hair hung halfway down to her waist, damp and cool, almost straight when it was wet. She wore white canvas sneakers, pedal pushers, and a green shirt, and carried a two dollar bill in her pocket so she could buy subway tickets. That was her allowance.
 

Christie station, on the Bloor-Danforth line and one block north of her house, had been open for six months. The opening of the subway had been a big event. She loved the underground, the rush of adrenalin when the red rocket disappeared into the dark and the wind from the tunnel whooshed through her hair. Standing tall and waiting for the first sight of lights, she felt like the figurehead on the prow of a ship.
 

The electrified rails scared her though, so she always stood well back on the platform, allowing twenty seconds to get into the subway car before the doors cut her in half. When the subway had opened on February 26 she had stayed on it for two hours straight, riding late at night in an almost empty car, Christie to Woodbine in the east, Woodbine to Keele in the west, then Keele back to Christie again.

She’d had lots of time to walk and ride lately. Her parents were arguing more than usual, or at least her father was. Her mother never said much, not even when he shouted she had
no control over the boys and she had damn well better get control of them soon, or he would have to knock some sense into them. Then they’d see.
Liza escaped the house just before he shifted his attention to her. His problems with his daughter were more specific: her face had started breaking out and he couldn’t stand the way she looked.

One of her school assignments the year before had been to research the educational system in the Australian outback. Her local library hadn’t had any information, so she’d gone to the Central Reference Library. After taking the subway from Christie to St. George, she walked the rest of the way. It was hot and humid in the city and the red-bricked buildings lining the street looked closed and unused. It looked like everybody else had stayed home.
 

Upon reaching the biggest Carnegie library in Ontario, she climbed the grand stairway on the corner. She liked the building’s classical lines, the lavish medallions over the windows and the dentil moulding. As she entered the spacious hallway, which led to several well-proportioned rooms, she noticed the shades had been pulled down in all the long windows. The darkness meant it was a little cooler inside, but the compacted dust and ink of so many books made it difficult to breathe. Still, she felt at home here, protected from the blinding glare of the street.

She took her time, almost afraid of what she might find now that she was finally here. She wondered if they even had copies of Dace’s hometown newspaper, the
Maitland Spectator
. Eventually she located the newspaper section on the first floor and walked around a couple of moments to give her eyes time to adjust. She stopped under a sign that said Index Table and practically crowed with delight when she discovered what was in one little box. From there she went to the microfilm for the
Maitland Spectator
, stored in filing cabinets along the farthest wall. The microfilms were filed by date, so it wasn’t difficult to find the one she wanted: July 1966. It was the newest film in the drawer. The last four weeks of the
Maitland Spectator
would be on newspaper shelves in the periodicals section, mauled over and incomplete.
 

A sign warned her she was going to need a take-up reel, and she looked around again. Against the far wall stood an Information Desk, or at least that’s what the sign on the long, shiny surface said. Liza approached grudgingly. She hated asking for anything.
 

“I’d like to borrow a reel, please, so I can use this,” she said.
 

The young woman behind the desk glanced up from the document she was studying, brow creased with annoyance. “And do you have the right microfilm?”

“Well, yes. There’s an index in that little blue box for the
Maitland Spectator
.” Smiling, Liza pointed to the Index Table on her left. That was a lucky find, for only major Canadian newspapers had been indexed in the
Canadian Periodical Index
.

“Would you mind lowering your voice?”

“Sure. I didn’t realize I was raising it,” she shot back, eyebrows raised.
 

The clerk, wearing brown horn-rimmed glasses, her glossy brown hair in a perfect shoulder flip, handed her a plastic reel without another word.

Liza stared at it, then quietly asked, “Excuse me, could you please show me how to set this up?”

The woman waved her hand at other people milling around her desk.
Why did everybody always come at the same time?
Her phone had started to ring, too. She ignored it and glanced around, looking slightly confused about what to do next.
 

She blinked up at a man by her desk. “Would you
please
form a line? No, we don’t do that here,” she said, turning back to Liza, but never looking her in the face. “Just follow the diagram on the reader. And mind the thirty minute time limit. Other people are waiting. Have you written your page numbers down?”

“Yes,” Liza lied.
 

The rest of the Newspaper Reading Room was busy. She found a free microfilm reader in the back of the room, but the moment she plunked down her cardboard box of microfilm beside the machine, the plastic spool burst from its container and reeled out onto the floor. Old people occupying the reader stations on either side of her glanced up in irritation, cross-eyed from perusing narrow columns of journalese.

“Sorry,” she whispered. Retrieving the
Maitland Spectator
from under her chair, Liza spent the next six minutes trying to coax the plastic film from the left spindle onto the right. Her fingers sweated and slipped. Beginning to feel little frantic, she wiped them on her pants.
 

Much to her relief, a disembodied voice to her right volunteered, “It’s supposed to go between those two plates of glass.”

“Thanks,” she whispered back, reloading the film and turning the advance knob right.
 

Ah, there it is. The whole newspaper page. Great!
Her attention was snagged by a photo of a luckless blond who had been charged with speeding, rather big news in Maitland it seemed. What if she went through months of an unindexed newspaper looking for a small reference to Dace, perhaps in the Courts column, only to read a Maitland boy had spent a night or two in jail and was then released? She speed read the dates across the top of the pages for the first half of 1966, checking them against her mental list. The index references she had found
must
be about Dace. Surely no other Devereux could have made the news. Especially in Maitland.
 

Small town life played out before her eyes until suddenly the news from
July 14, 1966
was highlighted. Two-inch-tall letters on the front page screamed:
Eight Nurses Strangled in Chicago
. Oh God. That had been and was still such terrible news. It had happened the week after she saw Dace at the Farm. Thank God they had arrested Richard Speck.